ill unoccupied, Michael?"

"Deed it is, Miss. Would ye care f'r to look around. There is nothing
changed there. I dust it meself."

"Yes," said the girl in a low voice, "I will look at it."

So Michael took her up in the lift, unlocked the door for her, and
then with the fine instinct of his race, forbore to follow her.

The shades in the square living-room were lowered; she raised one. And
the dim, golden past took shadowy shape again before her eyes.

[Illustration: "'Michael,' she said, smiling."]

She moved slowly from one object to another, touching caressingly
where memory was tenderest. She looked at the furniture, the
pictures,--at the fireplace where in her mind's eye she could see
_him_ bending to light the first fire that had ever blazed there.

For a little while she sat on the big lounge, her dreamy eyes fixed on
the spot where Clive's father had stood and she remembered Jacques
Renouf, too, and the lost city of Yhdunez.... And, somehow her
memories receded still further toward earlier years; and she thought
of the sunny office where Mr. Wahlbaum used to sit; and she seemed to
see the curtains stirring in the wind.

After a while she rose and walked slowly along the hall to her own
room.

Everything was there as she had left it; the toilet silver, evidently
kept clean and bright by Michael, the little Dresden cupids on the
mantel, the dainty clock, still running--further confirmation of
Michael's ministrations--the fresh linen on the bed. Nothing had been
changed through all these changing years. She softly opened the
clothes-press door; there hung her gowns--silent witnesses of her
youth, strangely and daintily grotesque in fashion. One by one she
examined them, a smile edging her lips, and, in her eyes, tears.

All revery is tinged with melancholy; and it was so with her when she
stood among the forgotten gowns of years ago.

It was so, too, when, one by one she unlocked and opened the drawers
of dresser and bureau. From soft, ordered heaps of silk and lace and
sheerest linen a faint perfume mounted; and it was as though she
subtly renewed an exquisite and secret intimacy with a youth and
innocence half-forgotten in the sadder wisdom of later days.

* * * * *

From the still and scented twilight of a vanished year, to her own
apartment perched high above the sun-smitten city she went, merely to
find herself again, and look around upon what fortune had brought